I had to go look that up too..

Thst spire of rock looks… when I was a kid, I fantasized about being a Sea King or or maybe a pirate… The only thing that was really fleshed out was the fortress. Complete with ballista and trebuchets.

Any how… that spire, is basically how I imagined the island to be.

Also, the bugs aren’t quite as ugly as lobster. Just saying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryococelus_australis?wprov=sfla1

Wikipedia article on these bugs insects

Dang at first I thought this was another story that just happened to be very similar, because I had never heard of “tree lobsters” before, but I had heard of the Lord Howe Island stick insect. But nah, just alternate names for the same creature. Anyway, I loved this quote from their Wikipedia article:

They scaled 120 metres of grassy, low-angled slope, but found only crickets.

You just know whoever wrote that was thinking how clever it was.

They tried to introduce them back to the island (which the islanders sort of went WTF why), which I don’t think worked real well

This part doesn’t seem to be correct. For starters, there is no indigenous population on Lord Howe Island, so the “islanders” aren’t really a distinct population so much as Australians who just happen to live on the island.

There has been an ongoing effort to exterminate the rat population, which must be completed before they can go ahead with the reintroduction. This has worried some local residents because of fears the poisons etc. might harm children, pets, and native wildlife. In fact they had to remove a bunch of native birds from the wild to temporarily store them in captivity until the poison had broken down.

But as far as I can tell, the reintroduction of the species to the island is still planned, and is not particularly controversial.

Fascinating story, thrillingly written! I’d like to subscribe to Field Biologist Adventures, please.

So what do they eat?

Something that really trips me up is that the humans that do those incredible, heart warming things often carry the same motivations and beliefs as the monsters. The road to hell, after all, is paved with good intentions.

For instance, I’m seeing a lot of pallells in this story that align with the creation of Africanized honey bees.

Right, they had me at hyena, lost me at parasites lol

Yeah, also this disgust and horror towards parasites is how we evolved. The Guinea worm is the extreme example of how bad it can get, but every parasite takes nutrients from us for no benefit to us, often causing discomfort in the process. Meanwhile we don’t feel that way towards predators because our response to predators is to get the fuck away, or to sympathize as we also prey. But disgust makes sense when the mechanism to defend yourself is to avoid letting it into your body.

What is this about penguin literature in ancient Greek?

I would say you’re for the most part correct but we should all be very well aware of the dangers of our anthropomorphizing of animals. These negative reactions in the public tend to lead to horrible things being done to organisms like sharks and bugs that are important to their ecosystems and the world as a whole.

Projecting human standards of life and morality onto other organisms is inappropriate and a net-harm for both humanity and animals. People doing this behavior would do well to be reminded of how most of their favorite animals like cats, dogs, ducks, goats, etc. reproduce in ways that would be considered absolutely horrifying to our human cultures.

I thought at first the name was a bit ambitious, as going back through its history it’s really been more of a monthly parasite. But then I got to 2010, and they really did do a parasite a day for that whole year. Impressive!